


Trotline

by colonel_bastard



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Blood, Community: hannibalkink, Fishing, Flashbacks, Harm to Animals, M/M, Predator/Prey, Sadism, Trauma, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Violence, Violent Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-20
Updated: 2015-02-20
Packaged: 2018-03-13 20:51:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,756
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3395939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/colonel_bastard/pseuds/colonel_bastard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will has tried many different baits for Hannibal’s lure, but the one that draws him closest to the barb is the one that hurts the most to offer: intimacy.  If Will wants Hannibal to swallow the hook, he’ll have to impale himself on it first.</p><p>Or: Will and Hannibal go on a fishing trip.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Trotline

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [Крючковая снасть](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5071327) by [Tinumbra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tinumbra/pseuds/Tinumbra)



> Written for a prompt at [hannibalkink](http://hannibalkink.dreamwidth.org/): Will notices that Hannibal is a sadist while fishing. 
> 
> Many thanks to my sister, the fisherman— I mentioned this prompt to her as I watched her preparing live bait, and we talked about it for hours while she stood there with a fishing rod in her hands. This fic would not have been possible without her extensive knowledge and advice, nor without her simple suggestion: "if you want to see something really sadistic, they should find a trotline." 
> 
> Set in a kind of nebulous point between _Kō No Mono_ and _Tome-wan_.

-

-

-

The scrapes on Will’s knuckles have begun to fade toward scars. He notices them when he looks down at his hands on the tiller of the outboard motor. Shallow cuts, quick to heal, though fragments of scabs still cling on in a few stubborn places. They’ll wash off the next time he takes a shower. Soon there will be nothing left but a constellation of darkened skin where the blood once broke through. 

Dawn hasn’t turned into day just yet. It’s still early in the morning and they have the water to themselves, just the two of them, picking their way downstream in a boat they rented from the kind of place that only locals know about. Will sits in the swivel chair next to the motor, both hands on the tiller but only one eye on where he’s going. The other is turned, as always, towards Hannibal. He’s sitting in one of the two chairs mounted in the center of the boat, designed to pivot outwards to face the water. Will wonders if he’s ever been on a ramshackle little craft like this. He seems like he’d be more suited for grand, elegant ships that don’t pitch and wobble when the current gets too strong. 

Hannibal watches the trees. The banks are crowded with them, and Will can see his keen eyes darting from branch to branch, scouring the woods for signs of life. He reminds Will of a cat sitting at a window, hoping for a glimpse of the birds— although he is temporarily powerless to act on his predatory instincts, he still takes great pleasure from the sight of prey. Will knows the feeling. He’s experiencing it right now, with every passing day, watching Hannibal as he swims closer and closer to the hook. _Exhilarating_ doesn’t even begin to describe it. 

They’re out here to catch bass. It was Hannibal who suggested it. The death, devouring, and display of Freddie Lounds was enough to arouse his appetite but not enough to satisfy him; he only saw the aftermath. Now he needs to see Will in the act of killing. He needs to see Will as a predator, and since they have not yet reached the point where they can share Hannibal’s usual hunting habits, he will settle for sharing Will’s instead. 

_I have seen you in many different roles which have been chosen for you; a teacher, a profiler, a prisoner. But I have not yet seen you in the role you choose for yourself: a fisherman. I would like to see that side of you, if you are willing to show me._

Will’s skin crawled at the idea of welcoming Hannibal into one of the only safe spaces he had left, but as he promised Jack Crawford, he’s a good fisherman— and a good fisherman knows how to choose his bait. Some fish bite on shrimp or squid. Some chase after the flash of a jig line in the water. Some prefer cut bait while others will only go for the minnows if they’re still alive and wriggling. It’s a process of trial and error, testing the water with different temptations to see which one draws a strike. Will has tried many different baits for Hannibal’s lure, but the one that draws him closest to the barb is the one that hurts the most to offer: intimacy. If Will wants Hannibal to swallow the hook, he’ll have to impale himself on it first. 

So he smiled and said he was willing. They made a plan and he packed a tackle box and rigged up a pair of rods and rented a boat and now here they are, alone again together, puttering down some forgotten tributary of the Potomac River. Hannibal searches the trees and Will searches for a good place to drop anchor so they can get their lines into the current. 

When Hannibal speaks, his soft voice sounds gunshot-loud in the still morning air. 

“It seems we have been preceded.” 

Will gives him a questioning look and Hannibal answers by pointing to the riverbank a short distance downstream. Now Will sees it, too— a floating orange marker bobbing in the shallows, tethered to a tree near the water. Narrowing his eyes, he looks across to the opposite bank and confirms his suspicions when he spots the marker’s twin, the artificial color making it stand out against this natural environment like a curve of red lipstick in a black and white movie. 

Will frowns. 

“Trotline.” 

Hannibal raises his eyebrows. 

“Trotline?” he echoes, tasting the syllables of the unfamiliar word. 

“It’s a fishing rig,” Will mutters, a note of disgust in his voice, cutting the throttle to allow the current to carry them closer. “Illegal in a lot of places. Not enough places.”

“What is it?” 

“You anchor a line on either side of the water.” Will points between the two marked tether sites as they approach. “Set hooks on it every few feet, then weight it down in the center of the stream and leave it alone to do its work.” The next word clips out of him without thought or motive. “ _Tasteless._ ”

He meant it with all honesty, but even as he says it he feels it like a nibble on the other end of the line; Hannibal is intrigued. He’s not watching the trees anymore. He’s watching Will. 

“Why do you say that?” he wonders. 

Will grimaces. He passes it off as annoyance at the trotline, but it’s really an involuntary reaction to the reminder that he does not need to perform in order to harmonize with Hannibal’s wavelength. He just has to speak his honest mind. 

“Because they’re dangerous,” he snaps, hating himself because it’s what he truly believes and it’s exactly what Hannibal wants him to say. “They’re sloppy. Worse, they’re lazy. There’s no craft here, no skill.”

“Surely it takes a certain degree of competence to prepare such an apparatus.” 

“Anybody can dig a hole and wait for something to fall in. You wouldn’t call it hunting.” Will makes a finite, dismissive gesture. “This is fishing for people who can’t be bothered to fish.” 

They’re close enough now for Will to lower the anchor. Once it hits bottom and catches, he lets out enough chain to bring them to a point where the trotline runs beneath them. 

“This one’s been left out overnight,” he explains, fastening the chain to keep them where they are. “They’ll probably come back later today to see if they’ve managed to snag anything.”

He doesn’t really have a plan. He just can’t bear the thought of sailing by and leaving this piece of garbage untouched. He has to put his hands on it, to understand who made it so he can visualize a target for his frustration. So he scrounges around in the deck compartments until he finds a boat hook, then brings it into the open space at the front of the boat, crouching and leaning out so he can dip it into the water, searching for the submerged line. Hannibal watches from his seat without offering assistance. Will’s arm goes in up to the elbow, soaking through his jacket and the flannel shirt underneath, scooping and rising until he finally sees a flash of silver and draws the center of the line to the surface. 

It shudders and jerks when he touches it with his bare hands. They definitely have something in their snare, though the few hooks Will can see are unoccupied. He loops the main line’s central anchor around the railing cleat right in front of Hannibal’s chair, then holds up the nearest auxiliary line to examine the hook. 

“Looks like they’re baiting with offal,” he says, thumbing at a chunk of flesh the size of a sugar cube. “Beef heart, maybe, or liver.” 

He offers the hook and Hannibal recoils subtly, his nostrils flaring. It’s rare to get an involuntary reaction out of him. In the next instant it’s gone and he’s neutral again.

“Is this a common selection for the task?” he inquires politely. 

Will shrugs. “Common enough.” 

He remembers his grandfather laying out trotlines every night. _Fast food fishing,_ he called it, laughing. _Cheap and easy._ He used cubes of beef heart for his lures; the toughness of the meat made it possible to use the same piece of bait for up to a week before it had to be replaced. By the third or fourth day, the rigs smelled like death. 

The line bucks in Will’s grip again. His handling of it must be stirring up whatever’s caught in the trap. No matter the circumstance, it’s always a thrill to feel a fish on the other end of the line— Will’s breath catches in his throat at the tremor, every instinct in his body telling him to _reel in_. 

“Here,” he says. “Feel this.” 

He drops the hook and reaches out to catch Hannibal by the wrist, pulling him out of his chair and down to his knees to put his hand on the main line, where Will cocoons it with his own. 

There’s a split-second stutter in Hannibal’s breathing— the second involuntary reaction in as many minutes. Perhaps he is as much out of his element as Will is in his own. It’s a curious prospect. In this world, on this boat, they are no longer equals. Will is the expert now, and Hannibal allows his hand to be guided and positioned, like a piano student accepting corrections from a respected teacher.

“Wait,” Will instructs, and Hannibal waits. 

The line jolts. Hannibal emits a short, sharp exhale of surprise and pleasure. Will makes the same sound a half-second later, as surprised and pleased by Hannibal’s reaction as Hannibal was by the thing that caused it. 

“They’ve got one hooked,” Will says, because he feels like he has to say _something_. 

“Yes,” Hannibal says, and there’s a slight edge to his voice, his instincts sharpening like the cat when the window unexpectedly opens and the birds are suddenly within reach.

He sits back on his heels, and Will suddenly realizes how close they are in the cramped quarters of the boat. When Hannibal shifts his weight, his knee _almost_ brushes against Will’s, the angles of their legs pointed inescapably towards each other. 

“Dangerous,” Hannibal murmurs.

 _Yes,_ Will thinks. 

“Sloppy,” Hannibal continues. “Lazy.”

 _The trotline,_ Will thinks. 

“The trotline,” Hannibal says, “is also effective.” 

“An unfortunate truth,” Will says, adding internally: _in many situations._

_Effectiveness trumps danger or I wouldn’t be here._

He allows their hands to linger on the trembling line, mesmerized once again by the scars on his knuckles. He remembers Hannibal’s hands on his own that night, washing the blood away, winding the bandages. _Stay with me,_ he whispered, and he’s been whispering it ever since, unspoken, woven into every word and deed. He twitches his fingers now, just to feel Will’s fingers twitch in response. Will wishes he didn’t understand him so well. He wishes he didn’t know that Hannibal would be completely content to spend the rest of the day here, with Will’s hand curled over his own and the two of them together savoring every spasm and tremor of the prey trapped on the other end of the line. 

_Move,_ Will commands himself. 

He can’t. 

Then the line gives a sharp jerk, and it snaps him out of his reverie long enough for him to release his grasp and lean out of Hannibal’s reach. He’s floundering, grabbing for anything to hold on to, something solid and real before he drowns. He looks across the water at the ugly orange marker and there it is, tangible: _anger._

“Son of a bitch,” he mumbles.

Hannibal says nothing, just examines the line he’s been left holding. Will gathers the scattered pieces of himself and condenses them into action. He has to _do_ something or he’ll sink straight to the bottom and never find his way to the surface again. He stabs an accusatory finger at the marker. 

“They don’t deserve this fish.” 

And he knows what he’s going to do. 

Now that he’s made up his mind, he just has to figure out where to start. He moves toward the line wrapped around the cleat— no. He moves toward the boat anchor— no. He hesitates in the middle of the boat, then turns to Hannibal. 

“I need your help.”

Hannibal raises his eyebrows in anticipation. An opportunity for collaboration is like blood in the water, sweet and irresistible. Some sharks can smell a single drop from miles away. 

“What can I do?” he asks, not quite calm enough to mask his eagerness. 

“Go to the anchor.” Will points toward the stern. “Get ready to let out the chain. Not too much, just— just watch me.” 

Hannibal nods and makes his way aft. Will pulls on a pair of work gloves before he unfastens the line from the cleat and tests the strength of it. It’s good, heavy stuff; perfect for what he’s planning. He looks back over his shoulder to see Hannibal crouched over the anchor chain, holding it with both hands, waiting for Will’s next order. 

“Give me some slack,” Will commands. 

As Hannibal eases out the links of the chain one by one, Will starts pulling hand over hand on the trotline, manually dragging their boat along its length. The vacant hooks they’d latched on to disappear back into the current, replaced by a slow, steady parade of more of the same. The spacing is sloppy; some of the drop lines are a sensible three feet apart, while others are separated by scarcely twelve inches. Hook after baited hook passes through Will’s hands as the tremor gets stronger, until finally he sees movement just below the surface of the water. 

“I see him,” he calls out automatically. 

He pulls them close enough and then loops the main line around the cleat again, double figure eights to hold them where they are. Turning to give orders, he sees that Hannibal has already taken the liberty of securing the anchor. Good. Will turns back to search for the net, a long aluminum handle with a durable plastic mesh on the end. Hannibal arrives beside him just as he finds it. 

Will leans in and scoops out the fish on his first try. 

“Cat,” he says. 

“A catfish?” Hannibal verifies.

“Uh huh.” 

It’s a channel catfish, hooked through the jaw. Down south he’d be a prize, but up north they want bullheads and blues; channel cats are considered trash fish. Will hauls him up into the boat. The auxiliary line is just long enough for him to get the fish down to the deck, where it jumps and slaps its tail against the planking. Will crouches on his heels, hypnotized by the struggle, listening to his grandfather’s voice from a million miles away.

_Cats love a trotline. They don’t gotta be teased or tricked, not like a walleye or a pike. All you gotta do is put somethin’ rotten on that hook and the cats’ll come sniffin’ for it. The stink draws ‘em out. Don’t gotta fuss about gettin’ ‘em on the line, neither— a cat’s so greedy he’ll swallow the whole thing in one go._

“Hook, line, and sinker,” Will mutters. 

He feels the vibrations in his vocal cords as he thinks it and realizes that he must have said it out loud. He waits for Hannibal to make a comment on the matter, but the other man remains uncharacteristically mute. Puzzled, Will turns to look up at him.

Hannibal has gone preternaturally still. It’s the artificial stillness of a tiger in the brush, a self-paralysis designed to render the predator invisible to his target. Motionless, Hannibal stares at the fish on the deck, his ravenous eyes tracking every desperate thrash, every futile attempt to break free. The fish bucks and writhes and Hannibal’s lip curls back until Will can see teeth. Understanding breaks overhead like a crack of thunder.

_He’s enjoying this._

Hannibal’s expression is that of a connoisseur sitting in the reverent darkness of an opera house. There’s the rapt attention; the silent, profound pleasure; and above all the fervent, visible desire to commit every last detail of the performance to memory. From this day forward, at any moment he chooses, Hannibal will be able to close his eyes and watch this fish dance its death throes at his feet. 

But no— he won’t just see the fish. He’ll see _Will_ , crouched over this victim they’ve brought in together, the two of them watching it fight for every last second of life. 

_No._

Will has to put a stop to this, right now. In the next instant he reaches down and grabs hold of the catfish with his left hand. With his right, he sets about removing the hook from its gasping mouth. 

“The hook is set deep,” Hannibal observes. “You could have pulled him in without the net.”

“Not a chance.” Will grunts with the effort of holding the fish still. “He would have snapped the line.”

“If such a thing were possible, would he not have done so already?”

“Not until he felt me pulling on him.” Now Will has a good grip on the hook, and he works the barb around the ragged hole it made in the cat’s jaw, trying to ease it back out the way it came. “The catfish is a stupid animal. He’ll sit on a line all night if he’s left alone. He gives up and accepts the hook. As long as he doesn’t fight, it doesn’t hurt.”

“He chooses surrender over suffering,” Hannibal intones. 

“And he sits there in the current until something comes along to remind him that surrender is not an option.” Will twists hard and the hook pops loose in a gout of blood. “Not if he wants to live.” 

“We reminded him.” There’s a note of satisfaction in Hannibal’s voice.

Will nods. “Soon as we started messing with the line, he started fighting again.” 

“He sensed the approach of a predator.” Hannibal tilts his head, carefully neutral. “And now?” 

“Now,” Will echoes. 

Still crouched on the deck, he scoops the fish up in both hands, weighing him. He’s three, maybe four pounds of fresh meat. For a moment Will actually considers keeping him for dinner. 

Then, before Hannibal can utter a word of encouragement one way or another, he bolts up to his feet and slings the catfish back into the current. It hits the water with a loud smack and vanishes almost instantaneously, just a few twists of his tail and he’s gone. Will heaves an inward sigh of relief. He feels lighter already. He can sense Hannibal’s eyes on his back, testing his weight the way he tested the catfish in his hands. 

“Was it because you object to anything caught by a trotline?” Hannibal wonders. “Or because you would have seen yourself as a scavenger?” 

“You tell me, Dr. Lecter.” Will glances over his shoulder, his gaze challenging. “What do you think?”

Hannibal approaches him, slow and deliberate, until they stand side by side in the prow of the boat, looking out over the water towards the bobbing orange marker. When they’re close like this, sometimes it seems like Hannibal is only a heartbeat away from closing the distance between them— like at any moment he might lean in until their bodies touch and he can rub his shoulder against Will’s in a feline gesture of companionship. Sometimes Will is afraid that he will be the one to lean in first. 

“I think,” Hannibal says, “the fate of the fish was incidental. You sought only to deny those you deemed unworthy of him.” 

_You know me too well,_ Will thinks, though aloud he says, “Maybe I just don’t like the taste of catfish.”

It’s close to being true; thanks to his grandfather, he’s certainly eaten more than enough catfish to last a lifetime. Out of the corner of his eye he sees Hannibal give him a mildly skeptical glance, as though he cannot comprehend the idea of disliking the taste of _anything._ It’s almost enough to make Will smile. Almost. 

“Come on,” he says, putting distance between them again. “We’ve got our own fish to catch.” 

He moves back over to the railing cleat so he can cast them off into the current. A simple enough task; but the moment he touches the trotline, his senses scream like a symphony of sirens and he knows they’re not finished yet. 

“Son of a bitch,” he mutters for the second time that day. “They’ve got another fish on here.” 

Unprompted, Hannibal comes over to check for himself, his sensitive fingers coiling around the line, his expression sharpening when he feels the telltale vibration. Will is reminded of a spider, stirred from slumber by the frantic struggle of whatever’s become tangled in his web. After some consideration, Hannibal raises his eyes to meet Will’s. The question remains unspoken, the same question again and again, forever hanging on the air between them. 

_What are you going to do now?_

Will has a feeling they’ll be asking each other that question until Judgment Day. 

“We have to move back towards the opposite bank,” he answers, this time. “Help me with the anchor.”

It’s the same dance they did to get where they are now — Hannibal on the chain and Will on the line — yet this time Will can’t shake a strange feeling of dread as they defy the current of the river, cutting straight across when they should be swept away. Will’s task is the same as before, hand over hand over hand, but Hannibal’s work has become slightly more complex. As they move back towards the center of the water, he is obliged to reel in the slack forming in the anchor chain, matching Will’s pace in order to keep their boat upstream of the trotline. Once they pass the weight that marks the middle point, he goes back to letting the chain out again, inch by inch until Will gestures for him to stop. They tie off their respective lines and meet at the boat railing. 

“Shit,” Will says. “It’s a mess.” 

Even from the surface, he can tell that something’s wrong. There’s a set of three auxiliary lines set much too close together on the main line, and all three are pulled towards the same tumultuous point below. Something must have gotten tangled in the hooks. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Hannibal staring at the roiling water, enraptured. 

“Hang on,” Will says. 

He goes to his tackle box and roots around until he finds the needle-nose pliers that he uses on particularly stubborn hooks. They’re designed with a set of sharpened edges on the inside for clipping wire. Will carries them back over and offers them to Hannibal.

“I’m going to bring him up,” he explains. “I need you to cut the drop lines so I can get him into the boat.” 

Hannibal accepts the pliers and gives the air an experimental snip. Will knows in his heart of hearts that Hannibal is no stranger to wielding sharp and dangerous tools. He wonders, idly, how Hannibal might kill with this particular instrument. In Will’s opinion, the best way to do it would be to grasp the handles in one hand and stab the point of the pilers into the eye socket. 

_God._

He shakes his head to clear it. 

“Where’s the net?” he mumbles. 

Instead of pointing it out as Will had hoped, Hannibal actually retrieves the object in question, turning it in his hand and offering it to Will handle-first, like a sword. Will accepts it with a grimace. It does not escape his notice that each one of them has now presented the other with his instrument. Hannibal is undoubtedly pleased with the symmetry. 

They lean over the edge of the boat together. Will dips the net into the water a certain distance away from the disturbance, then pushes deep and swoops up underneath his target. The fish hits the lip of the net and caroms off with such force that it takes both of Will’s hands to keep it from being torn out of his grasp. Twice more the struggling fish manages to avoid capture. On the fourth attempt, Will feels a sudden weight in the center of the net and knows he’s got him. 

“He’s coming up,” he calls. 

The fish is heavy and he’s fighting; Will feels the strain all the way through his arms and into his shoulders and back as he hauls the net up out of the water. It’s another channel cat, big and ugly and mad, its powerful body snapping this way and that as it tries to buck its way back into the deep. Will drags him as close to the boat as he can. His arms are already starting to shake. 

“Cut him loose,” he pants. “Quick.” 

Hannibal obeys, stretching out over the water to grab the main trotline and pull it near enough to reach his goal. Will realizes that he never provided Hannibal with any work gloves; he’s using his bare hands, and there’s a livid white stripe across his fingers where the line digs into his skin. Hannibal either doesn’t feel it or he doesn’t care, his face a mask of concentration as he brings the pliers to bear on the first drop line and shears it off close to the set point. The other two give way in rapid succession, and then the weight of the fish falls entirely into Will’s net. Three quick breaths, one two three, and then Will leans back and hauls the whole thing up over the railing and dumps it at Hannibal’s feet. 

The catfish spills out onto the deck, slapping and gasping. It’s easily an eight-pound animal, the sort of thing that would be considered an excellent catch if it were in better condition. Now the hooks have gotten the best of it. Will analyzes it like a crime scene, and he finds himself explaining it out loud as though Jack Crawford were standing over his shoulder, silently awaiting his evaluation.

“He must have swallowed that center hook.” Will indicates the gory barb wedged in the corner of the fish’s mouth. “Those other two were on either side of it, only twelve inches or so between each line. That’s... inadvisably close. Still, if he’d just let the current take him, he might have been all right.” Will sighs and shakes his head. “But he was a fighter.” He traces his fingers in his air, following the bloody gashes torn open all over the cat’s body, the glimpses of intestines slipping out of the seams. “When he started to to roll, the other two hooks snagged in his sides. He ripped them out. Then it happened again, and again. The more he fought, the more tangled he would have become.” 

When the voice behind him speaks, he honestly expects to hear Jack— but of course, it’s just him and Hannibal out here in the early morning chill. 

“He would not surrender,” Hannibal breathes. “How long has he been on the hook?”

Will knows what he’s really asking: _How long has he suffered?_ He looks down at the fish so he doesn’t have to look at Hannibal’s cold-blooded stare. Somehow he keeps his voice steady. 

“No way to know. Might have been an hour. Might have been all night.”

He doesn’t wait to see Hannibal’s reaction to that particular tidbit. Instead, he squats beside the wounded catfish, studying the predicament. For a moment his hands hover uncertainly in the air over its body, but then he decides on his plan of attack and moves forward. He starts with the hook set in its mouth. The fish has struggled enough that by now it’s relatively easy to remove, its original point of entry made so much wider by so much resistance. It’s the other two hooks that are going to give him the most trouble. Both are buried deep in the animal’s flesh, and the whole body is snarled up from nose to tail in the excess line. Although Will keeps it firmly pinned to the deck with one hand, the catfish still makes the occasional attempt to escape, a full-body surge that forces Will to lean in with all his weight if he wants to keep him down. 

He’ll just have to do this nice and slow. Grateful for his heavy work gloves, he keeps the one hand still pinioned to the fish’s back while the other he uses to grab hold of the nearest hook and start wriggling it loose. Blood oozes up out of the wound as he goes. He remembers how shocked he was the first time he saw a fish bleed. 

_“It’s red,” he whispered, horrified. “The blood is red.”_

_“A’course it’s red,” his grandfather had replied. “A fish is an animal, just like you.”_

One hook comes free more or less clean. The last one tears out rough, peeling off a strip of skin with it as it goes. Will uses the pliers to cut away the rest of the line. Hannibal never speaks. Will wishes he could pretend he wasn’t there, but he would be a fool if he ever let himself forget what is standing behind him. 

Once all the tackle has been stripped away, the catfish looks even worse than before, naked and ripped and bleeding on the deck. 

“He will not survive,” Hannibal says.  

“No,” Will agrees. “He won’t.”

“You must claim him as your own.” Hannibal’s tone is calm and logical. “If you cast him back to the river, his death will have no purpose. All of his struggles will have been—”

“—a waste.” Will agrees again. “I know.” 

He stays where he is, not moving. Hannibal sinks into a slow, graceful crouch beside him, and although his attention is ostensibly on the fish, Will knows that he’s the one under the microscope right now. 

“It will be merciful,” Hannibal says, coaxing him. “What is the most humane way to kill a catfish?”

Will gives a short, bitter laugh. 

“There is no humane way to kill a catfish.” 

And of course, it had to be a cat, didn’t it? It couldn’t be a bass or a bluegill or a carp, all native to these waters, all soft-headed and quick to succumb. It had to be this whiskered beast, this prehistoric creature that will cling to every last inch of life until Will finally wrenches it away from him. In his mind’s eye he can still see it, grim and foreboding in his grandfather’s backyard: _the catfish stump._

Hannibal is staring at him like he wants to know _everything._ Will starts with the easy stuff. 

“Cats have thicker skulls than most fish,” he says. “Thicker necks, too. Can’t cut the head off quick, like you do with the usual catches. It would be a slow and ugly business. Same goes for piercing the skull.”

“I’ve heard of some fishermen who keep their catches on ice,” Hannibal says. “Would it not be considered humane to let the catfish sink into sleep and then death?” 

“Oh, that would definitely be humane,” Will concurs. “Which is why it definitely won’t work. I left a cat on ice for five hours once; he was still alive when I came back to check on him. A catfish may be a stupid animal, but he’s also stubborn. He will refuse to die.” 

“Not unlike a man,” Hannibal remarks calmly.

It’s the calmness that chills Will’s blood. He refuses to acknowledge the comment.

“Most people are content to stun them,” he continues. “A few good blows to the head will leave a catfish limp and pliable.” 

_The dull, wet thud of his grandfather working at the stump, taking each cat by the tail and beating its skull against the weathered wood, one by one. Will watching, transfixed, as each body went up and came down hard, **thud thud thud** until the fish stopped fighting and let themselves be butchered._

“And then?” Hannibal prompts, soft. 

“That’s when you... you string them up and bleed them out.” 

_The back fence, lined with bodies and striped in red, the blood pulsing out in the rhythm of tiny heartbeats until it stopped coming out altogether._

“Of course, if you’re in a hurry, you can fillet them on the spot.”

_Cleaning a cat is easy, you don’t take the guts or the head or the tail, you just carve the meat right off the ribcage, leaving the brain and internal organs intact so that when his grandfather slings what’s left of the body into the swash Will can see it trying to swim away._

The wounded catfish puts forth another tremendous effort, jumping and arching as though it might be able to clear the edge of the boat and disappear into the water below. Will finds himself unexpectedly moved by its tenacity. When he speaks again, his voice has more resentment in it than he intended. 

“Just because the fish is stunned, people think it can’t feel pain.” He can hear his grandfather laughing at him and it still hurts. “It’s ridiculous. It’s... barbaric.” 

“It was once believed that human infants could not feel pain,” Hannibal murmurs. “No anesthesia was provided during medical procedures. Some were subjected to open heart surgery with the aid of nothing except a paralytic.” He gives Will a peculiar, sidelong glance. “Those who cannot express their pain are condemned to bear it in silence.” 

_Or to force their pain on others,_ Will thinks, and without saying anything he gets up and walks away. 

He’d walk forever if he could, keep walking until the soles of his shoes crumbled into dust and his feet were turned into raw meat by the unforgiving road, if it meant he could put that much distance between him and Hannibal— but it’s a small boat and he can only go so far. He stops at the tackle box and doesn’t come back until he’s got the fillet knife in his hand. 

“I’ve never tried this before,” he begins. “But supposedly there is a point between the eyes where you can stab a catfish directly in the brain.” 

How sad, how pathetic; somewhere between sunset and sunrise, sweat-drenched from another nightmare, huddled over the computer in the bleary darkness and typing into the web search: _is there a humane way to kill a catfish?_

“There is a first time for everything,” Hannibal says, by way of encouragement.

Will flexes his fingers on the handle of the knife and kneels down for better leverage. The knees of his jeans soak through with blood and river water almost immediately. He waits for the cat to finish its latest dance of defiance, then pins it down with one hand, pressing its belly to the deck. His other hand holds the knife, and he uses his thumb to feel around on the fish’s face, searching for the soft point where he must strike. He finds the divot under the skin right between its eyes, just like he’s read about. After a steadying breath, he rotates the knife in his grip and presses the tip to the sweet spot. 

“Here goes nothing,” he mutters.

He pushes in hard and fast. There’s nothing quite like the sensation of pushing a blade through the surface of skin. He can feel the knife slide past where the skull should be, and for one blissful moment he thinks, _I did it, I found it, I always knew there was a way._

Then the fish goes into convulsions. 

It’s ugly. The knife pops loose and the cat thrashes out of control, eight pounds of solid muscle, strong, _strong,_ , fighting out of Will’s grip to writhe freely on the deck with blood streaming out of the hole in its face. 

“ _Shit!_ ” Will barks, and before he can stop himself he reflexively tries to stab it in the head. 

The blade glances off the sturdy skull, skidding open a red gash that ends messily in one of the cat’s eyes. The fish is really fighting now. _That’s because he’s in agony,_ Will knows, and he hates himself for making it so. He didn’t want it to be this way. He wanted it to be clean. He wanted it to be merciful, but the introduction of unnecessary pain has changed this from an execution to a murder. 

Desperate, he slams the butt of the knife handle down onto the fish’s head. It jerks away from him, its tail twisting from side to side, its awful mouth opening and closing in countless silent screams. Will strikes it again and again, but he’s not strong enough or the knife’s not heavy enough or his aim’s not good enough but it’s not enough _it’s not enough_ the cat is bleeding and gasping and flailing around on the deck and he can’t stop it. 

_There is no humane way to kill a catfish._

And Will grabs it by the tail, heaves it up, and bashes its skull against the deck as hard as he can. 

_Grandpa, stop!_

Eight pounds is a good solid weight. Will lifts it again and brings it down with all of his strength; the sound of impact is a dull, wet thud. 

_You’re hurting them! They can feel it!_

_**That don’t matter none.** _

Once more, up and over, his arms trembling with the effort, _thud,_ hard and merciless.

_You shouldn’t hurt them. You said— you said a fish is an animal, just like me._

_**Boy, all this world is made up of animals hurting other animals. All you gotta decide is which animal you wanna be: the one being hurt, or the one doing the hurting.** _

**Thud.**

Will lets the catfish slip out of his numb hands. It slithers down to the deck, silent and still. Will isn’t sure if it’s stunned or if he actually managed to kill it. He doesn’t care. At least it’s not fighting anymore. 

“Will,” Hannibal says quietly. 

He just wants Will to look at him. So Will looks. He stares into those dark eyes and gives him the full brunt of his despair, making an open display of his anguish for Hannibal to drink in like wine. _Intimacy._ This is the hook stuck right through Will’s heart, the barb protruding from his chest, the scent of fresh blood drawing Hannibal closer and closer every day. Will does not hide the agony in his eyes, and when Hannibal sees it, he smiles. 

“I believe you have achieved the desired effect,” he says, indicating the lifeless cat. 

“Looks like it,” Will says, his throat dry. “Hand me the knife.” 

He can’t ignore the reverence with which Hannibal places the weapon into his hands. Hannibal is full and sated now; this glimpse of savagery will sustain him for days. Once again Will has shown him exactly what he wanted to see, simply by showing himself. Will tastes copper on his tongue and wonders if he bit it during his frenzy.

“Best to clean him now,” he says, distant. “While he’s still fresh.” 

He lays the fish on its side and positions his blade at the back of the neck, ready to cut a score line along the length of its spine to get through the thick skin. He feels oddly detached, almost weightless, like he’s floating at the top of a roller coaster dive. 

When he presses in the knife, the catfish bucks under his hands. 

And the roller coaster drops.

“ _Fuck,_ ” Will chokes out.

His heart rate explodes out of control. _Pain pain pain look what you’ve done look what you are capable of._ Running away from the catfish stump with angry tears in his eyes while his grandfather laughed and laughed. _Don’t you worry, boy, you’ll see what kind of animal you are someday._ And suddenly there’s Freddie Lounds, screaming and struggling in his arms as he drags her out of her car, and for just one _split second_ he thinks about how easy _how easy_ it would be to just _snap her worthless neck and be done with it._

_Some animals are the ones who do the hurting._

The knife clatters to the deck as Will lurches backwards. He wants to cover his face but his hands are covered in blood. 

“Oh, fuck,” he groans, his guts threatening to boil out of his mouth. 

In the next instant Hannibal has swooped in and seized the fillet knife in one hand, the catfish in the other. He pinions it to the deck just as Will did, then positions the tip of the blade at the bloody aperture Will made before. Without hesitation, Hannibal rams the knife in with full force. It jams halfway, the catfish sputtering and shuddering in protest. Hannibal bares his teeth and shoves his weight against the handle. Will can see the tremendous power in him, his shoulders straining with effort. Something gives way and the knife slams in up to the hilt. The cat’s tail arches up sharply— then shivers and goes slack. 

For a long moment, Hannibal remains crouched over his prey, breathing hard. Then, after a thoughtful pause, he withdraws the knife, giving it a sharp flick to dislodge the excess blood. He holds the blade gingerly in his fingertips and offers the handle to Will. 

“I have never cleaned a catfish before,” he says calmly. “I am quite curious to see it done.” 

Will accepts the knife without a word. The handle is still warm. 

They don’t speak as he cleans the fish, slicing through the tough hide and then carving the flesh off the ribcage just like his grandfather taught him how to do. He even slices out the bloodline to preserve the flavor of the meat. He’d brought along a cooler for their own catches, so when he’s done he slips the filets into plastic bags and nestles them into the ice for later. 

Before he can throw the body into the water, he is compelled to check that the fish is certainly dead. _He can still see the skinless, meatless carcasses trying to swim away in the filthy swash._ This time, Will is begrudgingly grateful for Hannibal’s lethal efficiency. He tosses the corpse into the river to feed its brothers and sisters. 

Nothing to do now except cast off and pull up the anchor. 

Will crouches at the railing cleat, the trotline wrapped around his hands, his bones aching with rage. Hannibal crouches by the anchor, waiting for his signal. 

“Give me some slack,” Will commands. 

He pulls them almost all the way to shore. He has to get as close to the end of the line as possible. When he can see the riverbed rising up to meet them, he stops and fumbles with the nearest auxiliary line until he gets to the hook. Then he brings up the needle-nose pliers and clips it in half, leaving the stem but cleaving off the barb. The spur makes a clicking sound when it hits the boat deck, useless. 

One down, the rest to go. Will drags their boat the length of the entire trotline, stopping at every drop point to bring in the hook and neuter it with his pliers, calm and deliberate. He will not leave the trotline as it is. Nor will he destroy it completely and leave its masters wondering what became of their trap. Instead, he will let them know that he was here. Hannibal never questions him, only brings the chain in and out as necessary; a silent, willing accomplice. A messy scattering of barbs and bait collects around Will’s feet. He doesn’t stop until they reach the opposite shore. 

After being held in one place for so long, it feels strange when they’re finally adrift in the current again. Will does not allow himself to look back at the little orange markers as they fade away upstream. He keeps his hands locked on the tiller and his eyes locked on his hands. There’s still a bit of blood under his fingernails. It was awkward trying to wash them, leaning over the railing and stretching down to touch the water below. The scars on his knuckles are especially pronounced now, dark shadows surrounded by freshly scrubbed skin. Will isn’t sure if they will continue to fade or if he’ll have them forever. Only time will tell. 

He looks up when he notices Hannibal crouch down by the bow of the boat, nudging a finger carefully among the detritus still strewn about the deck. He seems to find something in particular that he wants, and he plucks it up from the ground like a four-leaf clover. It’s an intact fish hook with a length of line still attached to it. From the breast pocket of his jacket, Hannibal produces a folded handkerchief, and when he opens it Will sees two other hooks already tucked inside. They are, of course, the three hooks that Will removed from the catfish who would not surrender. Hannibal places them all together and wraps them gently in the clean cloth, then slips the whole thing back into his pocket. As he rises again to his full height, he sees Will watching him and quirks his mouth, amused.

“It was my understanding,” he says, “that a fisherman takes trophies.” 

Will thinks of handcrafted lures laced with human remains. 

“They’re not the only ones,” he mutters. 

It’s going to be a long day out on the water. Will wonders if they’ll manage to catch anything else or if it’ll be only catfish for dinner. He knows that Hannibal won’t mind either way; as long as they’re eating something that they caught and killed together. Of course he won’t be satisfied with fish forever. One day he’s going to insist on prey of a different sort. They’ll have to cross that bridge when they come to it— _and try not to burn it as we go._

Now Hannibal reclines contentedly in his chair again, looking out over the water. He’s not watching the trees anymore. His gaze is turned inward, to the decoration of yet another chamber in his memory palace; a chamber that smells like blood and river water, where the walls shiver with the echoes of a dull, wet thud. He’s smiling. 

Hannibal almost certainly has a terribly ostentatious recipe for catfish in his repertoire. 

Will decides to fry it up, just to spite him. 

 

 

 

______________end.


End file.
